DUE News - 2009

Imagine being a sixth grader with an MIT graduate at your side helping you build your very own rocket launcher, underwater robot, or boat from scratch. This fantasy is becoming a reality for many Gloucester students thanks to a collaboration between the Gloucester Public School system, the Gloucester Education Foundation, and the MIT Edgerton Center. The goal of this collaboration is to explore new ways to reach out and engage Gloucester students in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) through new STEM curriculum, teacher professional development, student programs, and most recently, interaction with MIT alumni volunteers.

MIT alumnus Eric Mears, Class of ‘80, listens as Gloucester High School students CJ Mustone (right) and Brandon Henry (left) talk about their engineering projects

The Office of Minority Education’s Mentor Advocate Partnership (MAP) is a volunteer mentoring program for MIT students designed to assist them in enhancing their academic and non-academic development at the Institute. Essentially, MAP connects new MIT students with volunteer faculty and staff mentors. The guiding principle of MAP is that building strong relationships throughout the college experience plays an integral role in academic success and personal satisfaction for students. The mentors have also expressed great enthusiasm for the opportunity to engage with MIT students in a less formal, but equally rewarding manner.

MIT Naval ROTC midshipmen hosted the annual Beaver Cup Regatta April 4th on a windy afternoon at the Wood Sail Pavilion. The Beaver Cup Regatta brought together one-hundred sailors from ten different schools in order to foster camaraderie and sharpen seamanship skills.

Our students represent an important set of stakeholders for the work that DUE undertakes. We must be committed to being as transparent as possible with our students consistent with reasonable expectations for the confidentiality which is necessary for good decision making.

The Software Tools for Academics and Researchers (STAR) team of the Office of Educational Innovation and Technology (OEIT) recently introduced three new audiences to their web-based software tools StarBiochem and StarGenetics. StarBiochem allows users to visualize and manipulate molecules from the Protein Data Bank. StarGenetics simulates mating experiments between organisms that are genetically different across a range of traits and allows students to analyze the nature of the traits in question.

The NGS3 program is moving forward with work to support the goal of creating an effective, sustainable, and user-centric means of delivering student services to faculty, students, and staff. As a follow-up to last year’s Student System VISION Study, the NGS3 program is in its planning and strategy phase, which involves a number of planning projects. Although the pace of our work has been impacted by budget constraints, the program continues to be supported by the Institute.

Three MIT students in the Naval ROTCprogram have been accepted into the Naval Nuclear Propulsion program.

Thomas Schaefer, Vanessa Esch, and Juliana Rotter, MIT ‘09, will enter the Naval Nuclear Propulsion program with just a handful of other college graduates nationwide. All three will commission as officers in the United States Navy in June. Upon completing the program, Mr. Schaefer will become a submarine officer while Ms. Esch and Ms. Rotter will both serve as active duty surface warfare officers in the US Navy.

The IAP 2009 CUDA @MIT course 6.963 provided students the opportunity to practice hands on parallel programming with inexpensive massively parallel graphics cards using Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA). The goal of this class was to introduce supercomputing on cheap commodity hardware to the MIT community. The hope is that researchers will take advantage of this remarkably cheap and innovative technology to significantly accelerate computational sciences, making more experimentally testable hypotheses attainable.

On January 22 and 23, 2009, the DUE Leadership Team held our annual winter retreat. Retreats have been essential to our ongoing planning, since we developed the DUE strategic plan in 2006. We typically focus on issues facing DUE and the Institute, engage in problem-solving and prepare for major organizational events, such as the Visiting Committee proceedings last April.